Start the season with an all-Beethoven program, and you’re likely to draw a crowd. Play it the way the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra did Saturday evening at the Michigan Theater, with verve and style and a world-class violin soloist, and you’re likely to draw them back.

The orchestra, celebrating its 81st season and its 10th under the baton of current music director Arie Lipsky, has a faithful following - it has a near record number of subscriptions this year - and it was really on its game for its opening “Beethoven Festival.”

The blockbuster number was the Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, with Ilya Kaler making a welcome return as soloist, but its near-numbered-neighbors, the “Coriolan Overture,” Op. 62, and the Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60, are hardly also-rans.

All three works were Lipsky premieres, but as usual, he conducted without a score and with a definite point of view, drawing cohesive and cogent playing from the orchestra.

In the “Coriolan,” drama was the point: the outbursts that begin it, the sweet, hushed lyricism of the second theme, the sense we get of actors murmuring and scurrying and finally quieting their voices to a few words and then a final syllable.

In the violin concerto, Lipsky and soloist Kaler seemed to stress the serene, settled aspects of the work’s nobility, even in the dancing rondo finale, inflected with a kind of rustic sturdiness that didn’t bog the music down at all.

Kaler’s long acquaintance with the concerto allows him to live inside it, and he has both the virtuoso technique and the lyrical gift to do it justice. Playing with great color and true-ness, he got a round of applause at the end of the enormous (and enormously difficult) first movement - concert decorum is made to be broken when playing is this spectacular - and he offered a solo encore, a hauntingly played slow movement from the J.S. Bach C Major solo violin sonata.

And if you think there’s such a thing as the curse of the even-numbered symphonies, Saturday’s performance of Symphony No. 4 might have made you rethink. Or maybe, like me, you’re a fan of No. 4 and its even-numbered kin. Either way, elan is the word that comes to mind to describe how Lipsky and the orchestra buoyed the allegro of the first movement, which emerges like sunshine from the darkness of the adagio opening. I loved its cheerful breathlessness.

The third movement menuetto might have profited from greater separation of voices, but that’s a minor quibble in a performance that had beautiful limpid moments as well as doses of wit and an overall sense of impulsion.

Lipsky has promised that next year will bring Beethoven Festival II. I suspect no one will quibble with that.

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.

Photos by Dave Siefkes for the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra: Top, the A2SO on Saturday. Bottom, from left, Concertmaster Aaron Berofsky, Music Director Arie Lipsky and soloist Ilya Kaler.